His heart heaving with fear, Rohan Thomas has vivid recollections of bolting through bushes at lightning speed, each stride faster and longer as if chased by a ghost. It was his own ghost that he was fleeing to escape.
A survivor of the quadruple killing in Kraal, north-central Clarendon, Thomas is still wracked by the trauma linked to the bloodletting that unfolded on May 7, 2003, a flashpoint that regained international prominence last Thursday when the Trump administration slapped six current and former Jamaican policemen with travel and other sanctions.
Washington’s ban against Reneto Adams, Devon Orlando Bernard, Patrick Anthony Coke, Shayne St Aubyn Lyons, Leford Gordon, and Roderick Anthony Collier resurrected bitter memories for the residents of the rural district. They still claim that the Crime Management Unit, the feared police squad led by Adams, killed the Kraal quartet in cold blood even though they were acquitted in a high-profile case in December 2005.
Reneto Adams
Reneto DeCordova Adams, one of Jamaica’s most feared crime-fighters of all time, says Jamaicans should accept the not guilty verdict that was handed down by the Supreme Court in relation to the murder cases against him and other police personnel that arose out of the fatal shooting of four persons in Kraal district, Clarendon in 2003.
The US State Department appeared to have been referencing to the incident in Kraal district, where members of the Adams-led Crime Management Unit (CMU) were implicated in the controversial killings of two women and two men.
The deceased were identified as 45-year-old Angela Richards, 38-year-old Ferris Lewena Thompson, Matthew James, and a man known only as Renegade .
December 14, 2020
File
Reneto Adams
Retired SSP Reneto Adams says he doesn t regret his approach to policing, even as he insists that he has never breached human rights or taken the life of an innocent person. I am accused of many things, but I walk free all over Jamaica. And man, woman and school children always saying, Adams, we want you back. Everybody calling back for Mr Adams. People saying they want 10 Adams right now because of the crime situation in the country, the former crime-fighter said. Adams has been barred from entering the United States of America (USA) for what the State Department said is his involvement in gross violations in human rights in Jamaica . A feared crime-fighter when he served as a member of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), Adams has been penalised for his role in the May 7, 2003 killing of four persons in Kraal, Clarendon.
Jamaica’s national security establishment is now grappling with how to deal with four serving policemen who have been sanctioned by a “hypocritical” lame-duck Trump administration for alleged “gross violations in human rights”.
“I’m searching and trying to understand why now; why almost two decades later,” a senior official in the Holness administration said of the US imposing the entry block and other sanctions on the six men and their immediate families over the 2003 incident in Kraal, Clarendon, that left four civilians dead.
“Visas are cancelled all the time, but we’ve hardly ever seen something quite like this where the law is invoked. It must mean something. What? Should current officers in the JCF (Jamaica Constabulary Force) and the army be worried if they are linked to any other controversial shootings?”
Khadane Rowe, who witnessed the condition his uncle Rohan ‘Bulby’ Thomas was in as he ran for his life in Kraal, Clarendon, on that fateful day of May 7, 2003, says it is a memory that will never be erased.
Reacting to the news that the United States had imposed travel and other sanctions on six former members of the disbanded Crime Management Unit (CMU) of the Jamaica Constabulary Force as well as members of their immediate families because of the Kraal incident, Rowe said it brought little consolation.
The six – retired Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams, who led the unit; Devon Orlando Bernard; Patrick Anthony Coke; Shayne St Aubyn Lyons; Leford Gordon; and Roderick Anthony Collier – were named in a US State Department report as being sanctioned for committing “gross violations in human rights in Jamaica”.